


Prometheus By The Sea

by bendingsignpost



Series: Tumblr Fic [27]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Shipwrecked, Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, Normal Dean Winchester, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-18 19:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20318107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingsignpost/pseuds/bendingsignpost
Summary: When the clouds come, it’s almost a relief from the endlessly reflecting sunlight across the ocean.When the rain comes, it’s a little less cool.When the storm comes, it’s time to get scared.And then the waves come.





	Prometheus By The Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Anonymous said:  
No idea if you're still taking these but, castaway/prisoner AU?

Dean hates planes. He’s also terrified of them, but the hatred is more important, especially when Sam mocks him for the aversion. When it’s time to travel, Dean takes his car. For a couple absurd cross-country trips, he’s saved on gas and taken a train, even if he did have to rent a lesser, wimpy car once he arrived.

Traveling across the ocean, however, was another matter. Sure, congrats to Sam and all for successful cougar hunting, and fine, Rowena wanted to get married back home in Scotland, but fuck if Dean was going to take a plane. 

Honestly, it had been pretty bitching, taking a cruise over. Sam and Rowena had even joined him, Rowena’s eyes absolutely lighting up when Dean mentioned his alternative travel plans. She’d turned to Sam with a clear challenge in her face, and Sam had given in instantly, saying that having a bit of the honeymoon before the wedding couldn’t hurt. 

It’s the boat trip back that’s a lot more boring. Way smaller ship, no Sam to tease, no Rowena to help gang up on Sam. For all that Rowena’s douchey son is older than even Dean, Rowena herself is pretty great. But it’s Dean going solo on the trip back, and the smaller boat has his stomach rocking too, enough that he hasn’t been up for finding company for his tiny bunk of a bed. 

When the clouds come, it’s almost a relief from the endlessly reflecting sunlight across the ocean. 

When the rain comes, it’s a little less cool. 

When the storm comes, it’s time to get scared. 

And then the waves come. 

  


  


  


Dean and his inflatable lifeboat drift for what might be two days. He passes out from the sun, and the delirium of heat and dehydration make it hard to track time. The first aid kit fastened to the inside of the boat can’t do anything for that. 

On the second day–probably the second day, three days without water is death, and he’s not dead, not yet–he sees a seagull. It flies away in the same direction the boat’s drifting, and that feels like the sharp bleeding edge between hope and hallucination. 

  


  


  


During the shakes and shivers of the night, Dean jerks awake. He lifts his head, and though the world spins, it doesn’t rock. It rises, up and down, but only below his feet. He gets up, kneeling, and he’s come ashore. 

More precisely, he’s come a-rock, the shore several tide pools away. 

Staggering, dragging the lifeboat after him, Dean forces his body forward, forward. He brings the boat under the cover of a tree and lies back down in it, his brain clinging to hated childhood survival camping, his heart missing his father the way his back misses a bed, the way his stomach misses food and his throat water. 

He sleeps. 

  


  


He wakes desperate for water, even his clothing stiff and dry. He shivers and shakes and trembles, but he rises. He walks uphill despite the strain, the unending difficulty. Higher ground, for water to flow down. Higher ground, from which to see. 

Listening for the sounds of water and hearing only the panicked flapping of fleeing birds, Dean tromps his way through underbrush. He sits when he has to, stands when he must. 

The soil turns rocky, the ground to stone. The hill grows into a cliff, and Dean finds himself staring dumbly at what looks like a naturally made jail: three vertical bars of stone, stalactites and stalagmites joined in the middle of a hole in the stone. He stares at it, knowing this is important without knowing how. 

Stalactites. 

Stalagmites. 

Why are these important?

With a trembling hand, he tries to wipe sweat off his forehead, but it isn’t sweat, only a bug. He’s beyond sweating. There’s nothing left, no water remaining to drip down his nose. 

…Drip. 

Dean grabs a rock. Smashes the stalactite/stalagmite bars. Crawls through.

Squinting into the dark, he listens. Hearing nothing, no plinks or plunks of hope, he grabs up a handful of fresh limestone gravel and chucks it forward. 

It plunks. 

He scrambles forward on hands and knees, the sunlit gap in the wall lingering behind him without lighting his way. His hands plunge into freezing cold water. He drops, drinking from dirty palms, coughing, drinking again. He drinks until his belly hurts from it, and then he rolls over on his back, sighing, groaning, breathing. 

He’s alive. 

  


  


  


He dozes for a time. When he wakes, it’s with sunlight in his eyes, a beam shining directly in through the hole he made. What is that, late afternoon or simply later into the morning? He has no idea, won’t until sunset. 

The cave itself is cool in temperature and largely dry beyond the pool. Other stalactites descend from the ceiling, casting long shadows and offering Dean uncertain places to grip as he again forces himself to move. Every inch of his skin screams from burns, from scrapes, from hunger, but if there’s nothing else in here, this could be shelter. As long as he pees and shits downhill, he can’t contaminate his water, either. 

A shaky inspection only allows him to go so far back before the stalactites join with stalagmites, and he heads back to complete his circuit along the opposite wall from the pool. The sunlight only reaches so far. Shadows turn the dark wall strange, twist lumpy natural formations into something grotesque. 

No matter how Dean squints, the brown rock in the shadows looks almost like a man, chained to the wall by the wrists, his head fallen forward, his legs useless beneath him, his knees too far from the cave floor to kneel. 

Dean squints. 

Dean stares.

Telling himself to pull it together, Dean reaches out to touch, to prove to himself that this is some hunger induced optical illusion. 

A puff of dust rises from the bound man’s hair, and the seemingly stone figure looks up. 

Dean screams, and the entire cave screams with him, an endless echo of terror as Dean scrambles back, strikes a stalactite, and fucking books it out the cave door. 

Heart pounding, he runs downhill, the better for speed, the worse for stopping. He skids, almost catches himself on a tree, and falls on his ass. He keeps hobbling, keeps descending. He grabs a sturdy stick, both for support and defense, and he makes it all the way back down to the edge of the beach, back to the inflatable lifeboat. 

He’s seeing things from hunger, has to be. On that theory, he takes off his shoes and socks to venture back out into the tide pools. He smacks shellfish with rocks, snails included, and eats them raw. His stomach heaves, the potential causes too many to name. It’s enough to have him looking through the plastic first aid box, but there’s little that bandages and disinfectant can do for him. He takes a painkiller, though, wondering if this heat is a fever. 

Sitting on the small comfort that an inflatable seat can bring, Dean runs down a mental checklist. He’s found water. In a creepy kinda haunted cave, but fresh water. He has tide pools to raid, although not for much. Maybe he can catch and kill a seagull, although he doubts it. If he’s lucky, maybe he can figure out how to make a net and get some fish. 

Dean snorts. If he’s _lucky_, he’ll climb up to the top of that cliff and see a city. 

  


  


  


Dean is not lucky. 

  


  


  


The island is small, and the wooded area smaller. There’s a pile of driftwood along the same side as the rocks Dean’s lifeboat had come ashore against, so at least there’s some hope for renewable wood, though not much. If Dean can get a fire going once his lighter dries out, that’ll be a concern. And if Dean can’t, well, that’ll be a different concern. 

As night nears, Dean’s thirst returns. Days without water cannot be slaked by one long drink, but as the sun sets on the wrong side of the island, Dean lingers outside the cave entrance. He reorganizes his priorities, flicking his lighter again and again until, thank fuck, it lives up to its name. 

Making a torch is a bit harder, and Dean winds up with something a lot more like a bark bowl of smoldering leaves. He focuses on getting his campfire going instead, situating it just to the side of the entrance, hopefully angling it right. 

He peers in. 

He waits. Listens. 

“Hello?” he asks. 

The cave echoes him. 

“Hello?” Dean’s voice wavers. 

“Hello?” it whispers. 

“Hello?” croaks another voice entirely. 

Dean grabs a fallen branch, sets its leaves ablaze, and ducks into the cave. 

Against the wall, the dirty figure hangs, arms straining, eyes open. 

_It can’t be real_, Dean insists. _No one could survive that, there’s no other way in, the stone grew shut around him, no one could live that long. _

The figure’s arms are bound at the wrist, seemingly set into the stone itself. The hands curl loosely, uselessly. This is not a person able to feed themselves. For all the cave has water in it, a human would have still dehydrated to death. Hell, a human would have crapped and pissed all over the floor by now, and there’s nothing beneath this thing but dust and stone. 

“Hello?” Dean whispers anyway. 

It looks back at him, blinking slowly, squinting against the dying blaze of Dean’s leafy torch. 

Dean ventures closer. The thing is bound. It can’t move. It can’t get him. 

It’s not even real. 

Dean touches it on one dusty arm, and something crumbles away. Not the arm: what might have been the remains of cloth against it. Beneath this dust, there is skin, and the skin is warm. 

The thing that can’t be real keeps looking at Dean. “When is it?” asks the statue that can’t be a man. 

“Uh. August?” Dean says, unable to be more precise. It can’t be September yet, he can’t have been gone a whole week yet. 

“What year?” the hallucination asks. 

Dean tells him. 

“No, no,” the hallucination says. “It can’t be. Tell me, give me a benchmark. How long since, since…”

“Jesus?” Dean volunteers. “‘Cause it’s the same number.”

As Dean’s torch burns itself out, the thin wood unable to glow half as well as sun-dried leaves, the hallucination groans. In the flickering firelight shine from the entrance of the cave, its eyes gleam, two glinting tracks rolling down its cheeks. 

Dean touches one, and his fingertip comes away wet. 

“Are you real?” Dean asks. 

The thing–the man–lowers his head, drooping. More dusty cloth remains crumble from the motion, as if they would have fallen long ago, had he not given up on movement itself. 

Not knowing what else to do, Dean strips off his plaid shirt, pulls off his gray undershirt, and puts his plaid back on. The gray t-shirt goes into the water, and Dean cleans off the rest of the guy’s face. The hair and beard, thick and unruly with time, dust, and curls, these need a better wash than Dean can give him, but there is a man under there, under all the dirt. 

Dean wrings out the t-shirt before adding more water by hand, unwilling to put more dirt into the pool than he already has. He washes the man’s shoulders and arms, and he feels the constant tremble in them. “How long have you been here?” Dean asks. 

The man shakes his head. “Too long.”

Certain by now that this is, impossibly, a man, Dean finally thinks to do what he should have done in the first place. 

He gets a rock. He puts his hand over the band of stone encasing the man’s wrist. “Sorry if my aim sucks,” he apologizes, and he applies rock to stone. 

The rock in his hand shatters. 

The man sighs. 

“What the fuck,” Dean says. 

“I’m bound until my family forgives me,” the man tells him in a voice made of time and despair. 

“Uh, no,” Dean says. “You’re bound until I get, like, a hammer or something. There’s gotta be something stronger here than limestone.”

The man shakes his head. “Leave me.”

“Dude, I wish I could.”

The man simply looks at him, but Dean gets the feeling that this is a lot more effort than the guy’s made in a long time. 

“I’m Dean,” he says. 

“Castiel,” the man says, and closes his eyes. 

  


  


  


Dean spends the night at the entrance of the cave, curled up near his fire while it’s still going. 

  


  


  


In the morning, he drinks deep and calls himself an asshole. 

“Sorry,” he says, carefully walking over to Castiel with cupped hands. The water drips through his fingers onto his jeans and the uneven cave floor. “Should have done this yesterday.”

In the beam of morning sunlight, Castiel squints up at him in clear confusion, no matter how closely Dean holds his hands to Castiel’s mouth. 

“Dude, I’m doing the best I can here,” Dean says, trying to gesture while trying not to leak. 

Castiel gets the idea then. He lowers his head, slurping, his lips against skin, practically kissing Dean’s palms. He looks up again, mouth wet, and says a gravelly “Thank you.”

Dean makes another few trips before saying, “This is stupid, hold on.”

The plastic first aid box doesn’t have a cup in it, but the box itself is watertight. 

Castiel drinks, endlessly. “This is unnecessary,” he adds after Dean waters him the second time. 

“So you don’t want more?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Dean waters him again. 

  


  


  


When it comes to food, Castiel insists that Dean needn’t share, and Dean’s empty stomach agrees far more readily than Dean’s morals. Using his gray t-shirt as a bag, the sleeves and neck hole tied up, Dean returns to Castiel with an assortment of creatures from the tide pool. 

“Are starfish edible?” he asks. 

Castiel says, “Those are.”

They’re nasty, and probably not just because Dean cooks them to the point of burning. The hermit crabs and snails are better roasted than they were raw, though. 

“How much do you know about edible plants?” Dean asks. 

“Show me,” says Castiel. 

Dean shows him. He brings different sorts of leaves, some from bushes, from shrubs, from trees. 

“Not these. The roots of that. The stems of that. Do not eat those berries.”

Dean uses the berries as paint instead, marking the cave wall once for each day. His stomach growls and growls, unwilling to be silenced by so much water. 

Sometimes, he feels feverish, and Castiel tells him to come forward, to touch his hand. 

With nothing better to do than trust this impossible man, Dean does. They clasp hands, Castiel squeezes, and Dean feels better. Buoyed. 

After eight days are marked on the wall, Dean calls himself an asshole yet again. Castiel questions why, but Dean marches out. He returns within the hour, sweating, muscles straining, dragging a thick tree limb into the cave. It takes a good deal of maneuvering, of trial and error, but he finally gets it in position once Castiel can be coaxed into standing.

Groaning in relief, Castiel sinks down once more. Propped up on one side in the gap between two stalagmites, the tree limb supports his weight, forming an uneven bench. Though still raised, Castiel’s arms no longer strain, no longer hold up his weight. They tremble instead, untold years of tension shaking themselves out. 

“How are you alive?” Dean asks that night, speaking quietly over the soft crackle of his fire. 

“Because nothing has killed me,” says Castiel. 

“You’re immortal?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “I’m not.”

“I know.”

Dean shifts lower, lying on a bed softened by leaves, insulated against the stone by the deflated lifeboat, and sleeps. 

  


  


  


One week becomes two. As September grows increasingly cold, Dean gets better at spearfishing, which is to say, he actually catches something. He checks the trees for nests despite knowing it’s the wrong time of year for eggs. 

Castiel talks a lot about ancient humans, about things he’s seen, and this is how Dean learns how to make a stone axe. There’s a lot of smacking rocks with rocks, then smacking the resulting smaller rocks against wood. There’s also some smacking of the fingers, but Dean does get an axe out of it. 

Dean makes a joke about underwater basket weaving, and Castiel talks about the regular kind. Dean sits by the cave entry with palm fronds and stiff grass, even some vines pulled from trees, and he works by trial and error. At the beginning, none of it’s terribly good, more like cloth swatches, but Dean does need his undershirt back, and it’s kinda awkward in the cave when Castiel constantly has his dick out. 

Once Castiel has a very stiff loincloth, Dean starts to get the basket thing a bit better. He gathers tubers faster now, brings more back at a time. They cook easy beneath his fire while snails and starfish fry on a rock slab above it. 

When Dean complains to Castiel about a seagull snatching a crab and flying away, Castiel tells him of slings, and not the medical kind. Dean makes one, makes another when the first one falls apart, and in what he thinks might be the first week of October, he hits a bird hard enough to stun it. He breaks its neck, and nothing from his fire has ever tasted so good.

With weaving, a world opens to him. The net fails, but a basket is nearly as good, especially once he learns how to turn it into a trap. Castiel can’t tell him how to make it, not exactly, but he does know if it looks right once Dean’s done. 

“How old are you?” Dean asks more than once, sometimes just rhetorically. 

Castiel doesn’t tell him, and Dean is almost afraid he eventually will. 

October crawls by between long stretches of fishing and cold nights of shivering. Dean bundles straw together for cushions, weaves mats for the cave floors. His fingers blister and sometimes bleed, but Castiel asks to touch the injuries, and both pain and blood fade. 

There is so much of Castiel that Dean chooses not to question. If Castiel isn’t real, then Dean must be crazy. If Castiel _is_ real, Dean is another kind of crazy. 

Dean chooses sanity, and he chooses not to ask. 

For the most part. 

  


  


  


“You said your family has to forgive you,” Dean says, leaning against the crunchy pillow covering the stone wall, looking out the cave entrance at the rain. 

Castiel doesn’t reply. 

“Who’s your family?” Dean asks, avoiding the more obvious question. 

“They don’t have to forgive me,” Castiel says instead. “Very likely, they never will.”

“I meant, have to forgive you to set you free,” Dean says. 

“To be freed, I must be granted forgiveness by my family, yes.”

“So, what, they have magic stone keys or something?”

“Or something,” Castiel agrees. 

It rains into the night. 

  


  


  


By November, Dean’s fashioned himself something that looks like the Lost Boy’s armor from _Hook_, woven grass and vines shaped in a laughable attempt at a coat. He doesn’t wear it when he’s got a fire going, and he always wants to have a fire going these days, shivering at every gust of wind. 

Even with Cas, Dean won’t survive the winter. 

  


  


  


“Do you know about planes?” Dean asks. When Castiel shakes his head, Dean talks about them. Giant metal tin cans flying through the air. 

“I used to be so fucking scared of them, man,” Dean adds, lying on his back, looking up at Castiel on his padded bench. “Fucking terrified. Sam was always telling me they were safer than cars, but I wanted to take a boat instead. So dumb. And now I’m always watching the sky, hoping one’ll fly over this place.”

His SOS on the beach is giant, written in driftwood and stone. He’s rolled entire logs across that beach, fat lot of good it’s done him. 

“If I were unbound,” Cas says, voice soft and apologetic, “I could fly you home myself.”

Dean smiles ruefully up at him. “Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well. I appreciate it.”

Cas keeps looking at him, keeps looking so sad. 

Dean sits up. “If I could free you, I would,” he says. 

“I appreciate it,” Cas answers. 

Unable to stand the sincerity in Cas’ face, Dean gets up. Drinks from the pool. As he returns, Cas looks down at the bench, at the cushion that extends a little farther along the wooden length than necessary. 

Dean looks at it too. 

Cas tilts his head, looking at Dean with obvious hope. Dean knows the man–if he is a man–by his outline now, in any level of light. 

Gingerly, Dean sits beside Cas. He leans back against Cas’ arm, and Cas lowers his head to Dean’s shoulder. 

Dean wraps his arm around Cas’ bare back, puts his hand on Cas’ hip, on the woven knot Dean made to clothe him. 

They sit like that for a long time. 

  


  


  


  


Some nights, Dean even falls asleep like that. 

  


  


  


  


“What did you do?” Dean asks one morning, lying in his bed at Cas’ feet. He can see up the loincloth from here, but nether of them acknowledge this. “I mean, it doesn’t matter at this point, I get it, but I’m curious.”

“I disobeyed,” Cas says. “I watched too closely. Ventured too closely.”

“To us mortals?” Dean asks. 

Cas nods. 

“It’s pretty fucked up to say, but. I’m glad you did.”

Cas looks down at him with narrowed eyes. 

“You’re all that’s kept me alive, buddy,” Dean tells him. “The shit you know, that mojo you do whenever I should be dead of parasites or whatever. So. Thanks.”

Cas’ expression changes, and yet his frown remains. “Dean,” he says. 

“Yeah, I know,” Dean says, and he does. 

He’s always hungry. Always cold. 

He knows he’s dying. 

  


  


  


December is a long, slow collapse. Dean loses the energy to venture down to the tide pools, and the stockpiled tubers run low quickly. Mostly, he drinks water and lies at Cas’ feet. 

The more tired Dean grows, the more Cas talks. He tells Dean stories as if a cliffhanger will keep Dean hanging on through the night. He puts both bare feet on Dean’s open palm, and he works whatever mojo he can that way. Dean can feel it, but it’s not enough. It powers Dean to the pool and back, but no farther. 

He no longer marks the days on the wall. He can’t even get himself up enough to sit on the bench with Cas, although he longs for the comfort of touch. Once, crawling back from the pool, face dripping, he drops back onto his heels and kneels with his cheek against Cas’ thigh. 

Lightly, slowly, Cas bounces his knee. Just the once, not enough to dislodge Dean, just enough to show that he’d touch if he could. 

“‘m not gonna make it,” Dean mumbles, wrapping his arms weakly around Cas’ waist. He closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Dean?”

“Don’t wanna leave you,” Dean adds. “‘m sorry.”

“I’ll be all right,” Cas lies for him. 

Dean holds him as tight as he can, which is to say, not tight at all. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” Cas replies. 

“S’okay,” Dean mumbles. “I forgive you.”

With a slow scraping noise, something crumbles. 

Something clatters to the floor, sending echoes through the cave. 

“Mm?” Dean asks, too weak to look up. 

“It’s all right,” Cas says with a voice abruptly full of tears. “_Dean. It’s all right._”

A pair of warm hands strokes through Dean’s hair, and he sleeps. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've been seriously looking forward to posting this one. It's a personal favorite. 
> 
> As always, to see what else I'm working on, you can follow me on [tumblr here](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/).


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